So the mobile phone is celebrating its 40th birthday this week. On 3rd April 1973, the first mobile call was made by Motorola inventor Martin Cooper. It would take a further ten years for the company to bring their invention to the mass market at the rather costly price of $4,000.

We’ve seen huge advances from that day on Sixth Avenue, New York. The former house brick fits rather more comfortably in your pocket and we can while the hours pinging suicidal birds through the air. Perhaps not the advances the skilled technicians had in mind yet those Angry Birds have been downloaded some 1.7bn times!

It may surprise many as to the first person to make a telephone call, way back in 1985 in the UK was? None other than much-loved comedian Ernie Wise! Not sure why he was accorded this privilege but it is estimated that helped by Wise’s endorsement some six and a half billion of us now have a mobile phone.

The advancements in mobile technology have been staggering. The original DynaTAC phone had a battery life of 36 minutes and took a mere ten hours to recharge. We, of course, were not afforded such luxuries as a touch screen, cameras and gaming facilities and music, all essential functionality now. Gone are the days that Gordon Gecko needed both hands to lift his phone, in fact nowadays the lunch of wimps can now be enjoyed while we talk on our hands-free Smartphone.

I couldn’t imagine running Comms Express without the constant access afforded to me. But is it now a case of too much access; are we in touch too much now? Do we ever have a chance to completely switch off? How often do we witness groups of people all supposedly out to enjoy themselves as a group yet all texting?

Originally we were limited to 160 character size for text messages. This limit no longer applies to text yet lives on in the form of Twitter. Which of course we can enjoy on our mobile phones. Many believe that all the innovation designed to make our lives more simple has in fact complicated it, such is the plethora of gadgetry open to us. The original intention of the humble mobile phone, i.e. to speak to others, has been all but cast aside.  Increasingly the reason we use our phones is to surf the Internet. We, like so many other companies, realised this and introduced a mobile version of the Comms Express website.

Shameless plug interlude!!! Check out our mobile site if you have a mobile device to hand.

So as with the whole computer and telecoms industry, we can only wonder where we be in the next 40 years. What are the next advancements we can look forward to? And just how angry will those Angry Birds be by then?